What Goes into an Effective Marketing Plan?

There can be a lot that goes into marketing for a business. And it can be overwhelming. But having an overarching marketing plan to do so makes it much easier. It’ll outline what needs to be done and what the intended results will be, not just to your marketing team, but to the entire sales team. You might have some initial ideas of what you want to do to market your product, service, and overall brand. But they might not be the best idea. Or it might be a good idea that could use some improvements that a plan could provide.

A marketing plan, for the rest of the sales team, presents an overhead look at your ideas professionally. For the marketing team, it serves as an organized outline for people to fill in throughout the process. But while every brand and plan will undoubtedly be different, there are still fundamental parts of every marketing plan: research, objectives, a strategy statement, a buyer persona, a customer journey, tactics, and mockups. And having them in your marketing plan will help marketers ensure they’re prepared.

Initial Steps

Every marketing plan starts with research. Regardless of your business's industry, it’s constantly changing and evolving. And you’re expected to change with it. More than that, research also helps you as a marketer get a better idea of the company’s overall identity and what you can highlight in a marketing campaign. And it’s important to point out that you may not have discovered this information without doing research to find it.

That research can also include creating a customer persona and journey, which will give you a better understanding of who your customers are and how they interact with your brand. And it’ll make it easier to create your objectives and strategy statement. As we’ve discussed before on this blog, your marketing objectives are essentially like your goals. And remember to use the SMART acronym when you create them. And a strategy statement encompasses those goals into a single statement, one that will guide your overall marketing efforts for your campaign moving forward.

Tactics & Mockups

three people crowded around a long desk with one woman sitting and showing something on a tablet to everyone else

Once you’ve completed the initial steps, it’ll be easier to determine how to achieve the goals you’ve set for your marketing team for your overall campaign. In marketing, tactics are strategic actions that directly correspond to your objectives. And your strategy statement will help guide you in the right direction when it comes to your content. Depending on what you want to achieve during your marketing campaign, tactics can range from search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing, among other things. And to make it easier, creating mockups, or visual representations of what your final product will look like, will help you later when it’s time to prepare assets.

Overall, there are multiple steps in constructing an effective marketing plan. For marketers, having one in place helps immensely in better organizing your marketing ideas for your campaign. For everyone else at the company, it gives them a good idea of what you plan to accomplish and how. And that can be very powerful because often, your marketing team isn’t in charge of how much the company can spend on marketing efforts. The more people know about what you plan to do with the money they give you, the more likely they’ll be open to an increased budget. So, a marketing plan isn’t just a way to organize your thoughts as a marketer, it also serves as a proof of concept for the rest of your team. If you're looking for more marketing help for your small business, contact our marketing professionals at PSPINC. We'd be happy to help!

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